To my mind, it's a strategic act by China, which presumably has alternative technology that has been locally developed (possibly copied), that it wants to roll out. Politically it is an act of defiance against the USA, so it is a kind of act of war, in the ongoing rumbling and ever developing conflict between the two powers.

It will disadvantage Google, particularly in cutting off its intelligence gathering ability, but it also might suggest a problem within China, which is under pressure to maintain its

Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.

What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint [chinadigitaltimes.net] China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.

I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.

Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.

Reminds me of two anecdotes:

The World Rainbow Gathering (a hippie event) was held on Hainan Island in 2008. The authorities had no problem allowing a couple of thousand foreigners to hang out in the forest, discreetly smoke, and live out their utopian society. Just one rule, though: no Chinese citizens were allowed in, b

What vpn provider do you use? We are on holiday in china and use things like googlemaps, gmail, tourist guides that use google maps. It is very frustrating. Even the android app store is not working (play.google.com). I have tried many vpn providers but they all appear blocked, tor dors not work either.

I'm on holiday in China, and have been very frustrated with the slow, filtered web.

I've been SSHing to a machine at work, and using a dynamic SOCKS proxy through it (ssh -D 3128..., then set the SOCKS proxy in Firefox/etc to port 3128). I use Baidu for anything where the Chinese web should be just as good, e.g. weather forecasts.

If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?

If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?

The ones who actually do something are either in the ground, in prison, or at the business end of an AK-47 in a "fun-time all-day (and all-night) exercise party" in fields or factories, or, if lucky, simple unemployed. The ones who care but don't do anything are, well, not doing anything, for fear of ending up in the first group. That's why Internet access is useful, it allows them to speak out with less fear of getting caught.

I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?

The Chinese are no different from anyone else. They are happy to tolerate authoritarianism as long as the authorities deliver the economic goods, and the CCP has been extremely successful at that (greater than 10% annual growth for 30 years straight). It is no different anywhere else. The Arab Spring was not about democracy, it was about economic stagnation.

Until the Chinese economy has a major recession (which it will eventually), the CCP has nothing to worry about.

Get some perspective. As an American you are four times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned by your government than a Chinese citizen. I have seen little evidence that Chinese people fear their government. I have seen plenty of hot and loud political arguments in restaurants, on the subway, etc. Unless you are an overt troublemaker, nobody cares.

Get some perspective. As an American you are four times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned by your government than a Chinese citizen

As a Chinaman you are ten times more likely to be executed by your government. When they kill you they take you away in a van and your family never sees your body again. Many have speculated that this is so that they can break you down for your organs, which have signifcant resale value. Look up "chinese death van", and "black market organs" and read, read, read until you stop saying anything this dumb.

The same could be applied to the United States and its own blocking provisions. The only difference is that the USA rules the rest of the world through fear and imperialist aggression, so I suppose you might understandably mistake it for the rest of the world entirely.

Now let these companies stand strong, don't budge, and the people will become restless, they will become angry, and they will revolt against their government. Irony. The thing they are trying to prevent will cause a spark that will lead to their downfall.

Yeah, probably not, at least not in any predictable way. There are a million things that popular opinion and unrest within China make more likely to be reformed: the Hukou system, land distribution, criminal justice, etc. Single party rule and stringent censorship just don't motivate the Chinese like westerners constantly tell them that it should. I'm of the opinion all of this is a tremendous waste, but I don't expect any majority of the Chinese public to agree with me any time soon.

Agreed. Not to mention that many of the google services do have alternatives. There will be a hardcore of people getting pissy, but how much will the average person on the street care about restricted access to google and its products?

There are other providers of maps, email and search, people will move to alternative (probably inferior and state backed) services and then continue with their lives.

Extraordinary. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. In fact, the more you use it, the more ordinary it becomes. Google has been blocked before — you even say so in the summary. China blocks major western properties it considers disruptives during important national events (like the party congress, or the Olympics) when sentiments are running high and adrenaline is pumping to minimize the chances of an incident that could endanger lives or detract from the party mes

I am in China now. Guangdong province.Slashdot is not blocked.google doesn't work 90% of the time and is horribly horribly slow even though the google Hong Kong server is only a few hours away by boat. The web browser keeps throwing errors about invalid compression and it stops loading the page after waiting about 5 mins.. Gmail is working off and on. The more you use google and Gmail, the slower and less reliable they get to the point where I have to use Bing or taobao instead and a mail client because Gmail sits there for 30 mins with a progress bar and connectivity problems while trying to load my inbox. Gmail's imap works well in that i canMeventually send and receive mail if i wait long enough. My OpenVPN to my home PC in the states works well for about 5 mins and then drops to 5KB/sec and stays there unless i get a new ip from my isp.

I use reader on my tablet to get news via rss and the google proxy for that is almost always broken with messages about the google server having an error or the server timed out. It's very frustrating.

Bing works very well here. It is much faster than baidu and it is never broken like google.

I'm currently in Beijing and yeah, Google always works less than optimal when you go to.com and even.hk, but I found that google.co.uk works better (and works today.)
My VPN (that I set up on a VPS in Tokyo) stopped working yesterday though:(

Is this regional, or nationwide? There's a lack of understanding in the western media about the Great Firewall. They treat it like a monolithic linksys router with which daddy can turn services on and off.

Control / censorship of the Internet in China is at the very least city by city, and probably ISP by ISP. The conversation we are having here is stupid bordering on moronic.

I lived and worked in China for years. Baidu is fine for Chinese searches(98% is non tech searches) but if a person is doing technology searches Baidu sucks. I can understand the reasons for blocking gmail and other interactive communication, but blocking tech searches on Google will only harm the advancement of technology.
If the ISP knows that a is the primary user, they usually are not as strict, But you have to go to the ISP office to complain.

Does anyone else see the awkwardness between the #1 location for manufacturing computers, and internet capable devices, blocking the #1 first-stop (and probably one of the largest destinations as well) on the internet?

How have we allowed ourselves, as a world, to get into a position where China builds, literally, everything electronic these days?

What we going to do if/when they decide to go into lock-down mode due to governmental decision, or revolt? Taiwan isn't a fall back any longer because many manufac

No. I am in Shanghai, and Slashdot is not blocked. It is possible that it is blocked in Beijing, where the party congress is being held, but to the best of my knowledge, Slashdot has never been blocked in China. It just isn't popular enough here to matter.

Is/. even relevant enough to block it in Texas? I mean, really, Texas?

You know, that backwards state where TI helped create the integrated circuit and founded a research university (UTD) which is at the top of the game in nanotechnology and carbon nano-tube research? Around the corner from Lockheed Martin and up the street from Raytheon?

it's difficult to tell what is blocked or just some problem...people always jump to conclusions, of course.

however, slashdot wasn't accisble for extended periods in the 2006-2007 period. if it was being blocked, the I find it difficult to beleive it was deliberate...more likely the blocked a whole netblock which happened to include slashdot. i don't recall any sensitive topics, but people spout all sorts of bs here, so perhaps there was a thread I missed.

I am also in China. By the way, I just sent an email to my alternate gmail address. It went through just fine.

That being said, google has been throttled for months. I am able to search using google HK; but, if I try to follow a search result I cannot. I just times out. This has more to do with trying to push users to the Chinese brand product competitor, Biadu, than with censorship.

I would say the majority of Slashdot have no clue. I see repeated posts calling America a 'police state' or if there is some censorship there is a cry that there is nowhere worse on the planet than the USA. Those that have never left their mother's basement have no idea what a real police state means, or what censorship means. It doesn't occur to them as they post their rants on a forum that in a lot of the world that forum wouldn't exist in the first place.

I am an American of Italian decent living in China. I am also an engineer and an attorney.

I find it interesting how many people who have never been to China often claim China is a police state. Yes, China censors the Internet, but that is because a large portion of the populace is uneducated and easily manipulated. Democracy is very limited in China, but that again relates to the low level of education for peasants in China who if allowed to vote would choose an incompetent government. On the other side, as

The police in China are like rent-a-cops. To my knowledge, none of them carry a gun. The use of firearms is left to the PLA or a group that falls under its control. What you say about serious crime (or lack thereof) is true. The homicide ratio is very low compared to the population as a whole, although petty theft is real high. I can walk the streets of Shanghai at night and feel safe as though I was in my own backyard. You couldn't pay me to walk in Chicago in broad daylight however!

On the other hand, if you consider what the US is doing wasting 25% of its budget on "defense" (more like offense), then you would see that the US is following the Soviet Union footsteps a lot more, while China seems to be a lot more rational.

For now... China will be heavily investing in their air force and navy as soon as their neighbors start increasing GDP too. Not so much to counter US influence in the Pacific (though it does bug the hell out of them), but rather a show of force and jockey for world wide dominance relative to the other BRIC nations. Secretly, you just know Russia and India are not happy about this.

Yes, China censors the Internet, but that is because a large portion of the populace is uneducated and easily manipulated. Democracy is very limited in China, but that again relates to the low level of education for peasants in China who if allowed to vote would choose an incompetent government.

You can see what happens when you don't have the censorship in the U.S, where a large portion of the populace is uneducated and easily manipulated, who who when allowed to vote do choose an incompetent government.

Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.

I agree with what you say that one should not infringe upon the ideals of another. We should not force the Chinese to adhere to our standards of openness and censorship...

But I think you fail to see that generally as users of Slashdot, we're nerds. As early adopters, we're denizens of the 'Net itself.

"This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch; the beauty of the baud. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to ma

Unfortunately, it's deeply ingrained in their culture and will take decades or even centuries to beat it out of their institutions.

Yes it's deeply ingrained in their culture, it just so happens the opposite is "deeply ingrained" in your culture. To many Chinese "free speech" is just an excuse to be vulgar and disrespectful. At the end of the day "culturally blind" statistics show an individual has a much higher chance of being incarcerated by the state in the US than in China, yet I'm pretty sure I would feel more comfortable visiting the US than China (which as a British-Aussie is my own cultural bias at work).

Yes, yes we do. We have the right to say "that is wrong, you should stop that." Everyone does, about the actions of any political group (although they may be wrong, they have the right to say it). That's one of the things that "freedom of speech" and it's very very close partner "freedom of conscience", is all about.

There's also this thing about "needing a right" before we're allowed to do anything.

Even supposing the OP is correct, we actually have no right to judge, it's completely irrelevant.

We can do whatever the fuck we want, we're not limited in our actions to some inclusive list of "rights". The OP has rights that we can't abridge, but beyond that we're free to do as we please.

We don't have the right to judge (according to the OP), but we will do it anyway. China is wrong, their actions are less effective than actions based on freedom, and the sum total of all their authoritarian moves will eventually cause their downfall. Free regimes will outcompete authoritarianism in the long run in every case. "The illogic of waste".

Rights are a myth. If your rights can be "trampled" or with-held, then they are not rights at all. All anyone can do is whatever they can get away with. I suppose the only right a person might have is to try.

Rights (written or otherwise) are not a myth, they are bestowed on an individual by society. those individuals who trespass on those rights are (at best) ostracised by their society. This may not be the end result for every single "right trampling" that occurs between individuals, but when you consider an entire society or civilization, then it's a virtually a statistical certainty a "rights trampler" will be stomped on by society.

Rights are part of a highly evolved and ritualized trade-off between the s

You also have the right and more than that, the duty to look up what you are being fed as news. GreatFire is a website with zero-accountability. They don't even say who they are so you really shouldn't trust them as a news source, unless you are able to verify what they are saying. For all I care, we have been seeing a lot of anti-China propaganda which is very convenient to one player only: the Pentagon and its ungodly amount of funding from the Federal Budget. Just wait and see how the Global War on Terro

It is my business because I have friends who live there. I have a 163.com email account but I can't reach it half the time from the US. I have not bothered trying to figure out where it's failing. I normally use gmail to keep in touch with my friends, who also have gmail or hotmail accounts.

Most of my Chinese friends are on hotmail and use MSN messenger. I don't know why its so popular there. They also have a very strange chat program called QQ, that seems to me to be full of spyware, and has been very difficult for me to uninstall from a couple of laptops.

That's been my only experience with it, was that QQ was on some Windows laptops that were messing up badly, and when I tried to uninstall it, I had a real fight on my hands. There weren't a lot of English instructions online about how to deal with it.

Sorry, but judging things is a fundamental human right. This is something that I have found largely misunderstood by my Chinese friends. They will say things like "There is no difference between the US government and the Chinese government, both are corrupt." While I agree with the corruption (although it is a much more straightforward sort in China), I think they miss a key element in the United States, i.e. we enjoy certain inalienable rights that they don't understand the benefit of, largely because they have never had them.

Americans, and really everyone in western style democracies are free to criticize and judge any government, religion, or belief they want to in a public forum. This is freedom of speech and it is the most important right we have.

If we want to change our government, all we have to do is use our freedom of speech to convince our fellow citizens that it's a good idea. They we vote, and change it according to our collective will. This is not easy, of course convincing everyone to agree with you is hard, but it's doable and it's been done many times.

If the Chinese want to change their government, what option do they have? What path to change can they follow? They can't even do the most basic step of letting their fellow-citizens know th

Also, no-true-scotsman fallacy. If a nation has a system where the leaders are put into power by the masses, it's a democracy.
Whine all you want about the oddities of the electoral college (and it IS pretty messed up), but people vote and have an influence, no matter how small, over who leads them. If the USA isn't a democracy, what is?

Whine all you want about the oddities of the electoral college (and it IS pretty messed up), but people vote and have an influence, no matter how small, over who leads them. If the USA isn't a democracy, what is?

It's really none of your business unless you live there. You have no right to judge.

If China were Myanmar I might be inclined to agree with you, but its not. China is not an "emerging power", its arrived, and what she does affects people around the world. So, yes, everyone has a right to judge. I find it interesting that people around the world feel like they have the right to judge the US in exactly the same vein, so yeah, we have the right. Aside from the voluminous human rights violations and atrocities China commits on a daily basis inside, they've taken to picking fights with neighbor

Of course everyone has the right to judge, trying not to judge is like trying not to shit, your body won't allow it. Judgement is also like shit in that "other people's shit always smells worse than your own".